Life: An engineering perspective

Respecting the elders

2011-12-11T10:35:00.000-08:00

Everyone seems to have anecdotal evidence of "The kids these days don't respect their elders", while I have a suspicion all generations say that. Is there some good evidence?

The only study I found is: http://www.benetas.com.au/Portals/0/Respect%20in%20an%20Ageing%20Society%20full%20report.pdf

which seems to say that because elders have lost contact with children and adults, they have also lost their respect.

How should we handle talentless "Alpha male" ?

2011-12-11T10:22:00.001-08:00

http://phinnweb.blogspot.com/2004/10/right-man-and-fear-of-losing-face.html

I always thought it's important to teach children to be confident in themselves and not be bothered by misguided outside disapproval. I wonder if that would alleviate this "fear of losing face".

Reason is not for getting to the truth, but for arguing what you already are convinced is true. Everything makes sense now...

2011-05-10T17:57:00.000-07:00

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory

An interesting take on problem solving.

2010-06-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff

This seems like a good idea to improve political discourse

2010-06-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate

A fact based view of the world

2009-09-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Hans Rosling has put together an awesome site gapminder.org where you can get an impressive statistics tool for understanding the world.

Terror management theory

2009-09-04T19:48:00.001-07:00

I never heard of this before listing to the last episode of Reasonable Doubts podcast.
Terror management theory gives an interesting explanation to some of the irrational behaviors we meet sometime.

Motivation science has a deep insight into human nature

2009-09-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

Some very interesting research shows deep flaws in the (american) business model of human motivation.
Dan Pink on Motivation at TED
This also links with the behavior economics from Edge Video.

Balance approach to religion

2009-07-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a TV program that investigates the hard questions of the human condition in a balanced approach: http://www.closertotruth.com/
Contains many interesting interviews, including with my favorite Rodolfo Llinas.

The Luck Factor

2009-07-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

Richard Wiseman studied the difference between people that identify themselves as lucky and unlucky. After careful observation, he finds that lucky people engage in different behavior and mental processes than unlucky people. And you can do the same to improve your luck:
1. Maximize your chance opportunities:
- Build and maintain a strong "network of luck". (connect to more people)
- Develop a more relaxed attitude towards life.
- Be open to new experiences in your life.
2. Listen to your lucky hunches:
- Listen to your gut feelings and hunches.
- Take steps to boost your intuition.
3. Expect good fortune:
- Expect good luck in the future.
- Attempt to achieve your goals, even if your chances of success seem slim, and persevere in the face of failure.
- Expect your interactions with others to be lucky and successful.
4. Turn your bad luck into good:
- Look on the positive side of your bad luck.
- Remember that the ill fortune in your life may work out for the best.
- Do not dwell on your ill fortune.
- Take constructive steps to prevent more bad luck in the future.

CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION

2009-06-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

Very interesting approach to improved health.

Ames window.

2009-04-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

It's so interesting how you can mess with perception.

And other optical illusions.

Coral and crochet

2009-04-22T16:28:00.000-07:00

What does coral and crochet have in common?

Another page in the incredible book of nature

2009-04-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

Bacterial communication system

The Black Swan

2009-04-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

A video presentation from the author himself.

Experiment affects attitude towards strangers with coffee

2009-03-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

An experiment measured the way subjects describe a stranger based on a given description. Before starting the experiment each subject was asked to hold for a second a hot or cold cup of coffee. This primming affected the result toward a more warm or cold description of the stranger.
Yet again, all the functions in our brain seem connected leading to unexpected consequences.

Guns, Germs and Steel

2009-03-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

Why did Europeans conquer most of the world?

Useful wild plant species and big mammals that could be domesticated led to a significant lead in the Fertile Crescent and China compared to the rest of the world in food production. This caused:
- greater human densities, which caused more disease and thus disease resistance;
- specialized crafts people, which caused improved technology;
- specialized bureaucrats, which facilitated writing;

The rest of the world didn't have the food production and big domestic mammals on which to build powerful civilizations.
China was homogeneous and rulers put brakes on development and exploration.
Fertile crescent agriculture was not sustainable and lost it's development lead.
Europe imported food production and technology, and, driven by inner conflict, focused much more on development and exploration.

Thus when Europeans started expanding, they had far better technology and organization than everyone else, and carried a number of deadly epidemic diseases, the only barriers faced were local disease in tropical regions.

At least, this is what I understood from the book.

Reasons to doubt the existence of supernatural free will

2009-03-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

Physical warmth induces interpersonal warmth.
Oxytocin increases trust among people.
Using a magnetic stimulator causes you to move a limb and have the sensation of you moving it by your own free will.(Talk about experiment starts on page 8)
Decisions can be registered in the brain, several seconds before they become conscious thoughts.
The strange effect on consciousness that occur in split-brain patients.
And all other ways in which consciousness can be affected by natural processes (e.g. sleep, brain damage, mind-altering drugs).

When all the evidence about brain processes shows only natural causes and effects, any supernatural hypothesis should be discarded.

Religion and violence

2009-02-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

Attendance at religious services, but not religious devotion, predicts support for suicide attacks

The international year of astronomy

2009-02-08T21:09:00.000-08:00

Did you know this is the international year of astronomy?
Maybe you can get a 10$ telescope to see the wonders of the sky or show them to your friends.

Why statistics and science are important.

2009-02-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

Here are two videos that show why Statistics and Science are important.

And an amusing poem about Postmodernism / New Age Woo-Woo: Storm by Tim Michin

Moral dimensions

2009-02-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives
This opened my eyes about how people could vote for W. Bush. At the same time, I became more convinced that the people have the leaders they want and deserve.

The universe and our place in it.

2009-01-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

I'm fascinated by the universe and how we managed to understand part of it.
We live in the "middle world" of meters and kilometers per hour. Yet we discovered the huge expanses of the cosmos and the tiny world of sub-atomic particles, as show in this Powers of 10 movie.
When we can see thousands of galaxies in a tiny patch of sky with The Hubble Deep Field I find it infinitely arrogant to think the universe has any interest in the activity of a specie of hairless apes that evolved on a small planet, circling an unremarkable star among billions of stars in a galaxy among billions of galaxies in the universe. Keeping the scale, imagine a huge beach with all the sand on our planet, and you pick up one tiny grain of sand and compare it to the rest of the beach. That is our sun compared to the rest of the universe.
I hope someday people understand that we live on a Pale Blue Dot which we must handle with care and on which we make our own future.

A neuroscientists perspective on life

2009-01-29T06:03:00.000-08:00

I find Rodolfo Llinás enchanting in his explanation of life and the brain. Here is the interview in which I found about him:
Enter the "i of the vortex"

The book "i of the vortex" is pretty hard, because he explains in detail the activity of brain systems. So approach with caution.

Behavioural economics

2009-01-29T05:24:00.000-08:00

I'm fascinated about how easy the human mind can be influenced by minute things. Behavioral economics studies how and why do people make the irrational decisions they usually make.
Here is A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
If you don't have time or are to lazy to read the text, watch the videos, to me, they where an eye opener on so many issues.

Evidence that space-time is not continous and the universe may be a hologram

2009-01-28T07:47:00.000-08:00

Physicists are trying to measure gravitational waves but have some problems with noise in their instrument. A theory predicts this noise is causes by the discontinuity of space-time itself. Same theory sees the 3D universe as a holographic projection of a 2D event horizon. In other words
Our world may be a giant hologram

First post

2009-01-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

Hello dear reader,
I'm a software engineer with an interest in science, technology, psychology, brain science, human society, religion and skepticism. Some (at least one) friends asked me to write about the interesting knowledge I find reading, listening or browsing the web, and this will be my answer. Of course, I'll add opinion pieces too, but those should be easily to distinguish from the information gathered from others.
If I'll post anything of interest to you, please feel free to comment about it.

Cheers